Revolutionary Teamsters

Minneapolis in the early 1930s was anything but a union stronghold. An employers' association known as the Citizens' Alliance kept labour organisations in check, at the same time as it cultivated opposition to radicalism in all forms. This all changed in 1934. The year saw three strikes, violent picket-line confrontations, and tens of thousands of workers protesting in the streets. Bryan D. Palmer tells the riveting story of how a handful of revolutionary Trotskyists, working in the largely non-union trucking sector, led the drive to organise the unorganised, to build one large industrial union. What emerges is a compelling narrative of class struggle, a reminder of what can be accomplished, even in the worst of circumstances, with a principled and far-seeing leadership.

El segundo de cuatro libros sobre las huelgas, esfuerzos de sindicalizacion y campa?as politicas que en la decada de 1930 transformaron al sindicato Teamster en Minnesota y en gran parte del Medio Oeste norteamericano en un combativo movimiento social. Escrito por un dirigente del movimiento comunista en Estados Unidos y organizador del sindicato Teamster durante el ascenso del Congreso de Organizaciones Industriales (CIO). Herramienta indispensable para impulsar la politica revolucionaria, la organizacion y el sindicalismo eficaz. Poder Teamster describe el desarrollo y consolidacion del sindicato Teamster en Minneapolis y como sus dirigentes de lucha de clases utilizaron la fuerza que los trabajadores habian adquirido durante las huelgas de 1934 para lanzar una campa?a organizativa por 11 estados que llevo el poder sindical por primera vez a gran parte del Medio Oeste. The second of four books on the 1930s strikes, organizing drives, and political campaigns that transformed the Teamsters union in Minnesota and much of the Midwest into a fighting industrial union movement. Written by a leader of the communist movement in the U.S. and organizer of the Teamsters union during the rise of the CIO. Indispensable tools for advancing revolutionary politics, organization, and effective trade unionism.Teamster Power describes the growth and consolidation of the Teamsters union in Minneapolis and its class-struggle leadership, and the 11-state over-the-road organizing campaign that brought union power for the first time to much of the Midwest.

Shares the story of the revolutionary Marxist and Catholic Grace Holmes Carlson and her life-long dedication to challenging social and economic inequality On December 8, 1941, Grace Holmes Carlson, the only female defendant among eighteen Trotskyists convicted under the Smith Act, was sentenced to sixteen months in federal prison for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. After serving a year in Alderson prison, Carlson returned to her work as an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and ran for vice president of the United States under its banner in 1948. Then, in 1952, she abruptly left the SWP and returned to the Catholic Church. With the support of the Sisters of St. Joseph, who had educated her as a child, Carlson began a new life as a professor of psychology at St. Mary’s Junior College in Minneapolis where she advocated for social justice, now as a Catholic Marxist. The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist is a historical biography that examines the story of this complicated woman in the context of her times with a specific focus on her experiences as a member of the working class, as a Catholic, and as a woman. Her story illuminates the workings of class identity within the context of various influences over the course of a lifespan. It contributes to recent historical scholarship exploring the importance of faith in workers’ lives and politics. And it uncovers both the possibilities and limitations for working-class and revolutionary Marxist women in the period between the first and second wave feminist movements. The long arc of Carlson’s life (1906–1992) ultimately reveals significant continuities in her political consciousness that transcended the shifts in her particular partisan commitments, most notably her life-long dedication to challenging the root causes of social and economic inequality. In that struggle, Carlson ultimately proved herself to be a truly fierce woman.

To many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the West was simultaneously the greatest symbol of American opportunity, the greatest story of its history, and the imagined blank slate on which the country's future would be written. From the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Great Depression's end, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, policymakers at various levels and large-scale corporate investors, along with those living in the West and its borderlands, struggled over who would define modernity, who would participate in the modern American West, and who would be excluded. In Making a Modern U.S. West Sarah Deutsch surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940. Centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region--the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders--Deutsch attends to the region's role in constructing U.S. racial formations and argues that the West as a region was as important as the South in constructing the United States as a "white man's country." While this racial formation was linked to claims of modernity and progress by powerful players, Deutsch shows that visions of what constituted modernity were deeply contested by others. This expansive volume presents the most thorough examination to date of the American West from the late 1890s to the eve of World War II.

Four books on the 1930s strikes and organizing drive that transformed the Teamsters union in Minnesota and much of the Midwest into a fighting industrial union movement. Written by a leader of the communist movement in the U.S. and organizer of the Teamsters union during the rise of the CIO. Indispensable tools for advancing revolutionary politics, organization, and trade union strategy. How the rank-and-file Teamsters leadership organized to oppose World War II, racism, and government efforts -- backed by the international officialdom of the AFL, the CIO, and the Teamsters -- to gag class-struggle-minded workers.

Teamster Politics tells the story of how Minneapolis Teamster Local 544, guided by a class struggle leadership in the 1930s organized the unemployed and truck owner-operators into fighting union auxiliaries, deployed a Union Defense Guard to stop a membership drive by fascist Silver Shirts, combated FBI and Justice Department frame-ups, campaigned for workers to break politically from the bosses and organize a labor party based on the unions, and mobilized labor opposition to U.S. imperialism's entry into World War II.Teamster Politics is the third book in author Farrell Dobbs's four-volume series on the Teamsters Union and the labor movement in the 1930s. A worker still in his twenties in the Minneapolis coal yards in 1934, Dobbs became a leader of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strikes and central organizer of an 11-state campaign that brought tens of thousands of over-the-road truckers into the union in the following years.New second edition features includes new special 20-page photo section, many from the Northwest Organizer, the newspaper of Local 544.

"This is the story of the strikes and union organizing drive the men and women of Teamsters Local 574 carried out in Minnesota in 1934, paving the way for the continent-wide rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a fighting social movement. Through hard-fought strike actions, which were in fact organized battles, they made Minneapolis a union town, defeating not only the trucking bosses but strikebreaking efforts of the big-business Citizens Alliance and city, state, and federal governments. They showed in life what workers and their allies on the farms and in the cities can achieve when they're able to count on the leadership they deserve."--BOOK JACKET.